Word: wieners
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...Strauss: Wiener Blut (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Erich Kunz, Emmy Loose, Nicolai Gedda; Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus under Otto Ackermann; Angel, 3 sides of 2 LPs). Not so grand a ball as Die Fledermaus, Johann Strauss's masterpiece, this operetta is slighter but in spots even more delightful. A composite of Strauss music not originally written for the stage, the score is full of surprises: when sung, some of the waltzes and polkas take on a warbling charm they do not have as orchestra pieces alone. The libretto is preposterous, but offers linguists an unusually rich sampling of Viennese slang...
...Prodigy is Norbert Wiener's memoir of his difficult years as a child genius. Now a mathematics professor at M.I.T. and a pioneer in the development of machines to do the work of men (Cybernetics-TIME, Dec. 27, 1948), he has written a book that rivals in psychological interest, if not in literary skill, the recollections of such other youthful prodigies as John Stuart Mill and Samuel Butler...
Fool! Donkey! Ass!" Papa Wiener was a character in his own right. Omnivorous scholar, fanatical Tolstoyan rigid vegetarian, amateur farmer and heterodox Slavic philologist, Bialystok-born Leo Wiener was an austere and aloof yet somehow lovable paterfamilias. Papa was dissatisfied with ordinary schools and instructed Norbert personally until the boy went to high school. Papa, a good teacher was also an irascible man, and whenever Norbert stumbled, there would come streaming down upon him a flood of invective in German: "Fool! Donkey...
...personal cleanliness and personal neatness, and I myself never knew when I was to blurt out some unpardonable rudeness." By now, he wanted to rebel against papa, yet he lacked the daring to do so. At Harvard he was looked upon as something of a freak, for there, writes Wiener with a bitterness that the years do not seem to have erased, "a gentlemanly indifference" toward matters of the mind was very much the style. And most disturbing of all was his encounter with antiSemitism. Norbert had been brought up without any sense of Jewish tradition, his mother had once...
...come out of it all. He got his Ph.D. at 18, and did graduate work in philosophy under Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Josiah Royce and George Santayana. For a time he vacillated between mathematics and philosophy, finally chose math, with brilliant results. Looking back on his youth, Norbert Wiener tries hard to strike a judicious balance. He still admires the standards of scholarship and devotion to intellectual matters he learned from his father. He cannot help agreeing with papa that it was worth learning geometry, Greek, Latin and German "at an age when most boys are learning trivialities...